Sorry I didn’t post last week. I was down in Huntsville, Alabama, where I got the chance to experience “extreme disorientation” in a NASA contraption built for astronauts. It took a while to come down.
But my post this week is not about that Space Race, but a different kind of Cold War battle. It starts with giraffes.
So, you remember that week in seventh grade when you were learning about evolution (🤞), and someone told you the WRONG answer to the test question of ‘why giraffes have long necks’? The wrong answer is that some ancient giraffe ancestor with an average neck
stretched
and stretched
and stretched
and stretched her neck to reach those high leaves. And her little giraffe babies inherited the result.
This theory of evolution makes as much sense as the idea of weightlifters giving birth to babies with more muscles. But this was the thesis of Jean-Baptiste Lamark, an early proponent of biological evolution, whose theory was eclipsed by Charles Darwin’s.
At least, in most parts of the world.
In the Soviet Union, Lamark was lauded. Lamarkian theory fit the social engineering experiment of the USSR - the creation of the “Soviet Man.” Josef Stalin imprisoned Darwinist biologists and promoted the theories of the Soviet biologist Trofim Lysenko (“Lysenkoism” was basically Lamarkism through and through.) Darwin was beaten out of Russian biology.
I didn’t think Lysenko was still taught in Russian schools today. I thought this was all consigned to Soviet history. Then, earlier this month I read a story in the New York Times about Ukrainian soldiers freezing their sperm before heading to the front, so their partners could still build families in the event of their death. (In a time of war, freezing sperm is not just a personal but also a political statement - a way to remember a fallen loved one but also show resistance to the Russian invaders.) The Times’ article quotes one Russian, a “pro-Kremlin reporter” named Olga Skabeeva, who is quoted as saying on Russian state TV: “With the help of artificial selection… a whole army of selected Ukrainians with an increased level of Russophobia will be bred.”
Lamark! This is the Lamarkian hypothesis - that characteristics gained over the course of one lifetime can be passed on to the next generation. I wanted to laugh, but I was too terrified. This is the sort of “inherited characteristics” garbage that Hitler said about the Jews, that colonialists said about Africans… it is the foundational principle of genocide and forever war.
We can dismiss this Lamarkian thinking as crap science, which it certainly is, but that doesn’t make it any more insidious. Which brings me to today’s clip from the Rough Translation archive.
When reporter Katz Lazlo and I were in Ukraine last year, we started hearing how the Russian invasion had shifted the conversation around pregnancy. Some women had decided not to have kids who wanted them; others had surprised themselves by deciding to get pregnant for the first time. We heard about an increase in IVF. Patriotism, war, and so much death — all this played a part in people’s thinking. At the same time, it would be a gross simplification — and a stereotype - to paint any one person’s decision around pregnancy with the broad brush of nationalist intent.
How do you talk about people’s most intimate choices and how they’re affected by big events? My co-host Molly Webster and our editor Brenna Farrell and I had a great number of conversations about this. Our solution: to quote the grandness of these feelings, but not forget the humor, and irony, and individualism of each woman’s story. Here’s a 2 minute section from the episode. I’m curious to hear what you think.
I find it incredibly touching, and it almost makes me cry myself to think about the anguish of such questions, whether or not to give birth when your country is at war. I think you chose an excellent excerpt to share. Thank you for all you do